This animated GIF illustrates what animates the city. Now how do I improve it?

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

As steady readers know, I am purely a one-trick pony, a hedgehog (as opposed to a fox) and the one thing I know is the centrality of parking, street wall etc etc. in creating a real city. My purpose in creating this animated GIF is to have a useful didactic prop to stimulate discussion and to maintain focus on what is important. As I have discussed here on this blog at probably tiresome length, it is the relationship illustrated by the animated GIF above which explains why some streets are dead and then how to animate them (at least the physical pre-condition for animating them.)

Any suggestions to make it clearer, simpler, more direct and forceful will be happily accepted. I wondered, for instance if we should include on-street parking to the urban model and possibly eliminate the sidewalk in the suburban one as both are associated factors. But with that added complexity perhaps, I guess, we'd have to have a series of GIFs which cycled through and added/deleted elements? And I have to consider whether this is a stand-alone animation for the blog and/or if I'll use it in some sort of public presentation where I would be expanding and commenting on it. Hmmm. But enough for today!

(And thanks to Carl Juarez for his essential and indispensible technical assistance in actually creating the GIFs.)

UPDATE: Thanks for the suggestions! It's very helpful to receive feedback.

UPDATE 10/9/04: Don't miss this clarification of assumptions about the graphic. And And don't mis this one: The irreducible essence of city-ness.

Comments

[fouro]

Bulldozer, driven with the aid of opposable green thumbs.

[Luke Francl]

Maybe the sub-urban building should be only one story, with less windows.

[Ed]

Comments on presentation only:

I'd make it more obvious that you're just moving the building and parking lot, so make the non-changing elements remain the same during the transition.

For example, keep the "Urban" in the same place and have the "Sub-" appear before it, and keep the background, street and sidewalk the same (instead of fading out and back in).

[bkmiller]

What about cities that lack alleys? Most suburban communities are virulently anti-alley. I might remove that reference.

[JRoth]

I think that the NU people have resuscitated the alley's good name; I don't think I'd drop it (although you might want to think about your audience on this specific subject).

I can't help but think that a more perspectival street section would be more clear to laymen, who don't intuitively read planometric drawings.

We're actually working right now on reconfiguring a suburban commercial street, which has no sidewalks and parking out front; obviously, the section perspectives are pretty informative

[bkmiller]

Cool, jroth. Do you have any intial concepts or drawings?

[mawado]

My 2 cents:
The most illustrative bit of the difference between 'comforts' and 'uncomforts' for me is the pedestrian in the lower left corner. In the suburban mode, it looks like someone stuck half way across a street, standing on an island, waiting for the light to change. I would exchange the sizes and emphasize the 'island' nature of the sidewalk in the suburban half of the graphic. References to Survivor: Suburbia and immunity challenges that included dashing across parking lots would just be gilding the lily.
I think the emphasis on the pedestrian best illustrates your point of the parking lot disrupting customer interactions with the street wall. I mean, would you dash across an uncontrolled street (the parking lot: no cross walks, no traffic controls, no traffic laws) to look in a window on the off chance that there is something of interest there?

Thank you.

[Joe]

In the suburbs, they're not alleys. They're service drives.

[JRoth]

Actually, bk, you'd be amazed at the concepts we're putting out there right now, which are being taken seriously by both PennDOT (which owns the road and is running the job) and the property/business owners. Like, reconfiguring the street completely to make about half the buildings come up to the street/sidewalk, and centralizing parking for the businesses. For various complicated political reasons, PennDOT is very open-minded about this district (a scheme by a prior firm included multiple roundabouts - in an area without complex intersections).

Anyway, we don't have anything on our website about this project yet, but check back in a couple months.

[Benjamin Kaplin]

Here's my suggestion.
Actually draw in the flow of the traffic, cars into the parking lot, people from the cars into the building. People from the building out into the lot (maybe some Family Circus style doodles while they look for their cars) and then the flow of traffic out. The second image, would of course show the traffic through the alley, into the lot, into the building (etc, etc, etc). Then (because it's kind of difficult to tell at a casual glance which one you support, or which one you feel is a better urban parking paradigm) add something that details which one you support. Because it's difficult to tell when it fades gently from one view to the other.

Oh, and have it loop. I opened it in a tab, and when I finally got around to it, I never saw the point of the graphic. Because it was a static image. So I reloaded and saw the point. What I'm saying is that it should loop.

[William Lai]

Couple of ideas: While an overhead view is good, I think a perspective view from the person's point of view is even better. For example, in the Urban environment, the person see other pedestrians and the store fronts in the buildings. It's very human scaled.

With the suburban condition, one drives and see nothing but parking lot, and the amt of separation and isolation from other human is a key point to get across.

Idea #2: Show a person/car walking/driving down the street in the top view, but next to it show a real live video sequence of how the building/car/environment will look like. This will get alot more people who are less graphically oriented, and have hard time deciphering the diagram.

[Richard Soderberg]

Is there any way to indicate how Sub-Urban dramatically increases the distance between pedestrians and buildings for the sake of putting parking in a place visible from the street? I remember marketing research that indicated that a full parking lot was more likely to attract people than a storefront, but it's a vague, stale memory. That said, it's also a point subtly made in your diagram that pedestrians are "second rate citizens" when it comes to buildings these days -- and I keep wishing there was some way to draw an arrow between the ped and the building, or something.

To clarify the visuals, can you drop a dashed/dotted/semitransparent visual cue line down from the shared building/parking lot edge to the building corner at the bottom? It'd complete the linkage of the two levels and give people an instant visual cue to look down at the bottom, to go with the visual cues on the edges. I suppose this could conflict with the pedestrian distance idea; I don't know precisely what the best representation would be.

Here in Eugene, Oregon, I use alleys as a pedestrian as often as I use sidewalks, if not more so when possible -- they're safer, quieter (esp. at night), and criss-cross the city in a rather efficient pattern (if you're limited to a speed of 15mph or under :). It's not represented on your diagram, but I understand the point you're making, I think -- parking used to be tucked away behind access roads, but now it's become a part of storefront advertising and convenience. Hm.

[Michael Bates]

A couple of things come to mind, with the aim of communicating the visual impact
of a huge suburban parking lot separating the pedestrian from where he wants to
go.

(1) The cross-section view at the bottom would be clearer with some subtle
elevation differences, for example, showing the sidewalk and bottom of the
building at a slightly higher level than the street, alley, and parking lot. A
tree between the pedestrian and the street might also help make the
distinction.

(2) A view showing the front of the building as seen from the sidewalk would
help -- the urban version with the front door and display windows right there,
and the suburban version with the front of the building far in the background,
with asphalt and a few cars in the foreground.

[LarryB]

Frankly, the building-in-front, parking-in-back model works for suceesful suburban commercial districts as well. For instance, Great Neck, NY has two strips, Middle Neck Road (in Vil. of Great Neck Plaza) which has buildings facing the street, and Northern Boulevard (in Vil. of Thomaston and unincorporated areas), with parking facing the street. Guess which commands higher rents and draws shoppers? Great Neck also has a reasonable mix of housing densities and supplements its street and lot parking with a couple of mid-rise parking strucutres, one of which houses of Great Neck Plaza's Villiage Hall.

You could improve your illustration by showing the difference between urban streetscaping (sidewalk trees) and stranded, suburban parking lot trees.

[Njorl]

Why is there a parking lot in the Urban model? Shouldn't there be just a building, and perhaps a big 'P' on a sign with an arrow?

[TonyD]

Don't mean to be picky, because I basically agree with the graphic, but, here is how I think it could be improved:

Both "Urban" and "Suburban" show a similar lot size and shape, but Suburban lots are larger, and buildings are typically set back from lot lines.

Show pedestrians and cars in the plan view. Show more peds in "Urban" - more cars in "sub-urban" - this might help deal with the scale issue.

On the other hand, there might be a way to make the same point by showing less. . .

[Robert Boyd]

I understand and agree with the arguments against parking lots fronting buildings. This little animated gif shows the difference between the neo-urbanist planning idea and the suburban one. But what it doesn't do is show why one is better than the other. In fact, to me it makes them seem more-or-less equivalent. Given this, I question its utility as a visual aid for persuading people to adopt more urbanist ideas of planning. (That said, it does show the simple difference between the two planing concepts quite well.)

[Sage, Hollywood]

Looks great how it is. The alley has to be there for urban folks to reach the parking lot.

Urban streets have trees lining the sidewalks. Sub-urban areas have trees in the parking lots.

[bil]

Eliminate the parking lot.

[davigoli]

Suburban buildings don't have multiple stories - they sprawl. That's how they get the same amount of floor space, not by stacking efficiency.

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[courtney]

i'm actually impressed that i can google parking and this is what comes up. i'm even more impressed by the feedback you are getting for this image or gif.

i was wondering what your thoughts would be about a solution for a parking lot on a corner in an urban neighborhood.